Share This Story!

What's the big deal about Google Reader's demise?

Question. Why are people so bent out of shape about Google getting rid of Google Reader? Answer. Google's surprise announcement Wednesday that it would retire this service on July 1 provoked two common

Question: Why are people so bent out of shape about Google getting rid of Google Reader?

Answer. Google's surprise announcement Wednesday that it would retire this service on July 1 provoked two common reactions: "What's Google Reader?" and "How could you?!"

To answer that first question: Google Reader is one of many ways to get updates from a site's RSS ("Rich Site Summary" or "Really Simple Syndication") feed.

RSS, in turn, gives your browser's refresh button a break. Instead of reloading a site to see if it's changed, an RSS app will check for you at preset intervals, then present whatever new stories it finds.

Your RSS reader can show a new post's title and opening sentences or offer the whole thing, depending on how each feed arrives. And it can show the news at multiple sites in one window: The Mac RSS app I've used since 2003, NetNewsWire, tracks feeds for 31, ranging from tech-policy news to Washington-area urban design to baseball.

I could do this by subscribing to sites' newsletters, but then I'd have even more junk in my overflowing inbox. I could add those 31 sites to my Twitter feed, but that medium is so noisy that I would miss many updates.

(What Twitter does well is alert me to news at places I don't read regularly.)

Google Reader was late to the field when this free service debuted in 2005, but it soon offered a tantalizing combination to RSS fans: a great Web interface, plus the ability to check the same feeds in standalone apps in computers and mobile devices.

Developers of RSS-reader programs responded by switching to Google hosting: NetNewsWire, for example, made that move in 2009. The market for competing RSS-sync services dried up.

And then everything worked fine until Google broke up with us. In Wednesday's blog post, Google developer Alan Green wrote that "usage of Google Reader has declined, and as a company we're pouring all of our energy into fewer products."

Google's logic is hard for many Reader users to take when its Google+ social network sees so much less use, going by what sends readers to other sites. At my own blog, the stats show that over the last year Reader yielded more than 25 times as many page views as Google+. Larger sites have reported even more lopsided results.

Beyond these immediate feelings of abandonment, there's a deeper fear: That RSS itself will die now that Google has disowned it.

I do have one favor to ask of all these folks vying to replace Google: Can you please not all use the same synchronization service inside your RSS apps, no matter how great it might look at first?

—

Tip: Bookmarks aren't obsolete either.

Gathering a list of bookmarks to your favorite sites can seem even more unfashionable than tending RSS feeds, thanks to increasingly smart auto-complete functions in browser address bars and the ease of finding most sites in a quick Web search.

And some browsers, such as Google's Chrome, do an excellent job of hiding bookmarks altogether. (They show up when you open a new, blank page.)

But bookmarks still help in many cases: sites whose titles use common words; those that appear far down in search results; pages within a site that only serve small constituencies (for instance, the addresses on which you'd look up how soon the next train or bus will arrive near your home or office).

On that last note: The case for bookmarks is especially strong on mobile devices, where it's more of a pain to type search queries and easier to tap a bookmark item or icon. So why not dust off your bookmarks?